Monthly Archives: April 2013

Life expectancy at birth is 55 years, mean years of schooling for adults over 25 is…. 1.3 years. Yikes!  GNI per capita in PPP terms is $1,222. ( Digression: This is because you can have someone work for you all … Continue reading →

Dès 2000, Salif Diallo, alors tout-puissant bras droit de Blaise Compaoré, avait demandé sa tête, sans succès. Diallo n’a cessé, durant la dernière décennie, de s’ériger en sentinelle face aux ambitions présumées du frère. Mais, à ce jeu, il a … Continue reading →

In the initial study, the researchers provided each of two groups of wild monkeys with a box of maize corn dyed pink and another dyed blue. The blue corn was made to taste repulsive and the monkeys soon learned to … Continue reading →

Strange because Umm Ruwaba is further east than El Obeid and En Nahud… how on earth did they get past those places?  And why not attack El Obeid itself? Fighters with the Justice and Equality Movement, or JEM, attacked the … Continue reading →

Plowing is recognized across many rural societies as a gendered activity, with men controlling the plow .  Alesina, Giuliano and Nunn (2013) have suggested that there exists a strong correlation between the suitability of soils and climate for the plow … Continue reading →

When you are with your daughter in Burkina Faso, and she doesn’t speak French, you spend a lot of time in the school pool.  What is she going to do, pluck chickens with Salimata?  She can’t, duh, she’s a vegetarian.

The problems at Ralph Lauren centered on misconduct at its Argentine subsidiary, which over a four-year period paid customs officials about $593,000 in bribes to import the company’s goods into the country. The illegal payments allowed the company to avoid … Continue reading →

That’s me way in the upper left corner…. Was an interesting event.  I will blog about it later tonight or tomorrow. Comme quoi, le sous-sol national, contrairement à ce que pensent les gens, n’est pas la vache à lait des … Continue reading →

Le montant global de la fortune de Karim Wade serait en effet de 694 milliards de francs CFA, soit un peu plus d’un milliard d’euros. C’est en tout cas la somme évaluée par ses accusateurs, et c’est celle sur laquelle … Continue reading →

At ISO pool today, a birthday party for a kid… Leslie and Sukie saw the whole show while I was playing tennis.  I’ll post a few more pictures later….

A series of secret contracts seen by Global Witness spell out how BSGR promised Mamadie Touré (sometimes known as Mamadie Conté) millions of dollars and shares in the massive Simandou iron ore concession in return for help in acquiring the … Continue reading →

The FAVL team in Ouaga (Michael, Donkoui, Krystle) spent the morning prioritizing our agenda, and then rearranging the office.  Nothing like a little furniture moving to make people feel better about the lives. Well, it works for me.  I went … Continue reading →

Sukie and I went to watch the dressage/jumping.  Reminded me of my youth when we would watch my sisters and brothers, out at El Comandante and then later at the place in Isla Grande (must have been where Convention Center … Continue reading →

The facts seem to be that the health workers declared a 96 hour strike, and a woman died in childbirth, along with her baby, and the government promptly fired the person who should have been the anesthesiologist, and indicated the … Continue reading →

A Loser who can be suckered into bad bargains is set to become one of the Clueless. That’s why they are promoted: they are worth even more as Clueless pawns in the middle than as direct producers at the bottom, … Continue reading →

As in: “Environ 2635 litres de carburant frelaté ont été saisis mercredi tôt dans la matinée le long des principales routes nationales partant de Ouagadougou … “